It was being told that I was working “too hard” that finally did it. I’d been in the job for about four months, and I was constantly looking for work that would not only show initiative but would also actually keep my interest long enough to not think about how much I hated what I was doing.
During the interview I was assured that the job entailed high level involvement with all sorts of departments; that there would be creative writing opportunities; that I would be able to “find” stories and proactively pitch them to media.
It soon became apparent that what they really wanted was a glorified admin worker who answered phone calls and emails within five minutes, and who ran around putting out fires that weren’t really fires at all.
The chain of command was long and the processes bureaucratic and hierarchical: it often took weeks to have one document approved, and even after we done “circling back” and “ticking all the boxes”, there was still someone, somewhere in the hierarchy that wanted to make “just one small change”.
I tried hard to make it work. I was paid well, the money came in on time, there were all sorts of benefits like cheap exercise classes, free baked goods, lots of birthday celebrations and “cultural” events. But in the end, all I wanted was for my work to mean something, to make some sort of difference in the world.
Idealistic? Perhaps. Or maybe I’d fallen into what the late social anthropologist and author, David Graeber, described as a “bullshit job” – a job so meaningless and pointless that even the person who is doing it thinks so, and which becomes psychologically self-destructive when paired with a work ethic that associates work with self-worth.
The bullshit jobs theory took off in 2013 following an article Graeber wrote for Strike!, where he postulates that despite access to advanced technology, which could make 1930s economist John Maynard Keynes’ prediction of 15-hour work weeks a reality, we have “marshalled [technology] to figure out ways to make us all work more.”
To achieve this, he argues that society has created “jobs … that are, effectively, pointless”, resulting in “huge swathes of people … spending their entire working lives performing tasks they secretly believe do not really need to be performed.”
Since then, I’ve often thought of Graeber’s definition and have largely managed to find work I find personally meaningful. Which is why when, upon opening a workplace newsletter earlier this year, I felt all my previous feelings surge again.
“Gen Z’s bad rap”, it read, leading to barely-disguised laments from big corporations about how Gen Z wants work to actually mean something, how they’re so idealistic about climate change and contributing to society – and they want their jobs to be, too.
As a result, some big organisations have started offering more opportunities for graduates to work pro-bono, to take time off for community work and to invest in wellbeing and mental health programs.
This got me thinking: perhaps the issue is not that workplaces need to make space for “worthy” work within their organisation: maybe it’s that these jobs shouldn’t exist in the first place?
“Work that is useful, socially valuable, is fairly remunerated [and, those who do it] get full recognition for it is good for us,” suggests Jean-Philippe Deranty, a Macquarie University Professor of philosophy with an interest in work culture.
“There is no doubt these jobs exist,” he says, “but the definition of bullshit jobs has some flaws, especially if we understand them to be a form of employment that is so pointless, unnecessary or pernicious that even the employee cannot justify its existence”.
Calling something pointless means it holds no social value, Deranty says, which is different top calling it “pernicious”, which means actively destructive.
“The problem here is that Graeber’s definition embraces different types of social value: the absurd and the destructive.”
Under the absurd category we have the mass of “professional, managerial, clerical, sales, and service workers” Graeber points to, who work primarily in “financial services, telemarketing … corporate law, academic and health administration, human resources and public relations”.
“These jobs are absurd because nothing is produced from them, with many people into them to make sure the process continuously reproduces itself,” Deranty says.
These are different to “pernicious” jobs, which are jobs created by capitalism that are harmful, he says.
“Many of the jobs we do today are destructive of people’s health, mind, emotional balance, the environment – just think of the tobacco industry,” he points out.
In many ways, work – something that historically has been a galvanising force for humanity, bringing people together to achieve something – can be a meaningful pastime, provided it is fairly paid and its purpose is clear, at least to the person doing it.
“Work today is one of those complex things which suffers from formalised, digitised abstraction,” Deranty says. “We are constantly trying to translate processes, relationships, performance into something measurable, and the way to do it is to mathematise everything.”
The irony, Deranty points out, is that following a job to the letter of its description is considered a form of protest (“work to rule”) or, in more recent parlance, quiet quitting.
“People in bullshit jobs are caught in the process of abstraction, which is what makes it meaningless,” he adds. And while he doesn’t think the answers lie in the post-work movement (the radical idea that humanity should move beyond work and instead spend time enjoying life and helping each other), work that exists mainly to fit capitalistic imperatives is not the solution, either.
“Most jobs are not actually bullshit,” Deranty points out. Every time we go to a doctor, buy our food, read a book, sign up to a new course, get out hair cut – these are all possible because of someone’s work.
“Many administrative jobs are useful; for example, it’s good for me to know that students enjoy my classes, and that intel can only be gathered through surveys.”
But the truth remains that for work to be meaningful, it usually needs to be meaningful on both an individual and more societal level.
“It’s a terrible punishment to make someone do something they think is worthless,” Deranty says.
Hard agree from me.